Thursday, April 26, 2018

Kim Jong-un crosses border into South Korea for historic peace talks


Kim Jong-un has become the first North Korean leader to cross into the South since the end of the Korean War in 1953 for a historic summit with his southern counterpart. South Korean President Moon Jae-in personally greeted Kim with a hand shake at the border truce village of Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the countries.

Monday, April 23, 2018

Bob Dorough - School House Rock



Schoolhouse Rock! is an American interstitial programming series of animated musical educational short films (and later, videos) that aired during the Saturday morning children's programming block on the U.S. television network ABC. The topics covered included grammar, science, economics, history, mathematics, and civics. The series' original run lasted from 1973 to 1985; it was later revived with both old and new episodes airing from 1993 to 1999.


The first song recorded was "Three Is a Magic Number", written by Bob Dorough, and a children's record was compiled and released. Tom Yohe listened to the first song, and began to doodle pictures to go with the lyrics. He told McCall that the songs would make good animation.

3 Is a Magic Number



To coincide with the upcoming United States bicentennial, a third series, titled "America Rock", airing in 1975 and 1976, had episodes covering the structure of the United States government (such as "I'm Just a Bill") along with important moments in American history (examples include "The Preamble" and "Mother Necessity").

I'm Just a Bill



Bob Dorough
1923 - 2018

Sunday, April 22, 2018

The Golden Ratio: Fibonacci numbers and nature


In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are the numbers in the following integer sequence, called the Fibonacci sequence, and characterized by the fact that every number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding ones:
{\displaystyle 1,\;1,\;2,\;3,\;5,\;8,\;13,\;21,\;34,\;55,\;89,\;144,\;\ldots }

The sequence Fn of Fibonacci numbers is defined by the recurrence relation:

{\displaystyle F_{n}=F_{n-1}+F_{n-2},}




Saturday, April 21, 2018

Arlington Street Church - ASC Tiffany Education Center



The Arlington Street Church is a Unitarian Universalist church across from the Public Garden in Boston, Massachusetts. Because of its geographic prominence and the notable ministers who have served the congregation, the church is considered to be among the most historically important in American Unitarianism and Unitarian Universalism. Completed in 1861, it was designed by Arthur Gilman and Gridley James Fox Bryant to resemble James Gibbs' St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.


In the 1960s, the congregation became active in the Civil Rights Movement. James Reeb, a minister active in the congregation, was murdered during a march in Selma, Alabama. Under the ministry of Jack Mendelsohn, the church became a center for protests against the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, the church led AIDS awareness programs and support for the homeless.

The main sanctuary space has 16 large-scale stained-glass windows installed by Tiffany Studios from 1899 to 1929. Originally, all of the sanctuary windows were glazed with clear glass. In 1898, the congregation voted to start installation of memorial stained glass windows created by the studios of Louis C. Tiffany, and commissioned a set of designs for all 20 windows. The last of 16 Tiffany windows was installed in 1929, just before the Great Depression dried up available funds. By the time the economic crisis had eased, Tiffany Studios had been liquidated (in 1937), and new Tiffany windows were unobtainable.


The Tiffany windows were designed by Frederick Wilson (1858–1932), Tiffany's chief designer for ecclesiastical windows. He made extensive use of Tiffany's special glassmaking technologies, including confetti glass, iridescent glass, 3D-textured "drapery glass", pastel colors for "painting in glass", and the trademark opalescent “Favrile” glass. There are as many as six or seven layers of glass in a Tiffany window, producing visual textures that would otherwise have to be painted in. Only some fine details impractical to produce in glass were hand-painted, in permanent enamel.

Friday, April 20, 2018

The Ascent of Money


In the four-hour version of THE ASCENT OF MONEY, historian and author Niall Ferguson seeks to explain the financial history of the world, exploring how our complex system of global finance evolved over the centuries, how money has shaped the course of human affairs and how the mechanics of this economic system work to create seemingly unlimited wealth or catastrophic loss.